How to Upgrade Ubuntu Without Rebooting with Ksplice

Don’t you hate it when you’re in the middle of something important and the operating system keeps bugging you to reboot your computer, just because an important security update was installed ?

I hate it and I’m sure the guys behind Ksplice hated it too. They hated it so much that they decided to do something about it and developed Uptrack.

Uptrack is a software updater which works in much the same way as Ubuntu’s default update manager, with the exception of one important step. Uptrack doesn’t require the computer to be rebooted after an update has been installed. Ksplice, the company behind Uptrack, has developed a technology which lets a running program, even the kernel, be upgraded without the need for a reboot. Isn’t that awesome ?

Installing Uptrack on your Ubuntu 9.04 system is quite easy as you’ll see.

First of all, Request for an access key from Ksplice’s website. Enter your email address and you’ll recieve the key by email within a couple of minutes.

Now, you should add the Ksplice repository to APT, so that you can use apt in the future to update Ksplice also.

In your terminal, type the following command to open up the Apt sources list.

The first command downloads the PGP key for the repository and the second command adds it to the list of keys trusted by APT. This will make sure that apt doesn’t complain everytime you download something from the ksplice repository.

The second commands refreshes the local APT repository and the third command installs uptrack. The key that Ksplice emailed you earlier, will be required now, so make sure you have that handy. Uptrack has a default CLI which can be used to manage updates, but if you’re the GUI kind, run the following command to install the uptrack-manager GUI for uptrack.

sudoaptitude install uptrack-manager

Once uptrack-manager is installed, you’ll see an icon in the taskbar which is Uptrack’s way of letting the user know if and when new kernel updates are available.

The ‘K‘ icon with the red warning means that there are updates available for your system. To view the updates that are available, just click on the icon.

To install the updates shown on the screen, just click “Install all updates“. Uptrack runs via cron to periodically check for new updates but if you want to manually check for updates, you can click on the “Check” button to do that.

That’s all. You can now say Goodbye to all the schedules reboots that you had to do earlier everytime a software update came through.